Ceasefire: hostage-release brings home the true cost of this tragic exercise

FOR over 15 months we witnessed a bloody war between Israel and Hamas. Devestation wrought on the Mediterranean seaside enclave of Gaza and the shocking faces of civilians caught up in the tragedy. Prime real estate reduced to rubble. What began as a jubilant victory over the ‘Zionists’, a terror incursion into the State of Israel that killed some 1 195, followed by celebration through the streets of Gaza City and major centers, quickly turned into a painful exercise on how not to go about achieving ones objectives.

If anyone still thinks this is the anti-apartheid struggle 2.0, think again. Only a fool would believe that Cuban solders fought Pretoria to a standstill, or that South Africa gained its democratic order, not via peaceful negotiation but rather solely through the barrel of a gun. Yet such are the claims made by Palestinian pro-war activists who continue to condone Hamas hostage-taking, a military solution sold to the world by resort to the term apartheid — nothing more than a pointless exercise which merely deflects attention away from an obvious Jihad, whose tactics of martyrdom and sacrifice, directly lead to the deaths of some 40 000 Gazans.

Attacking Israel on the religious holiday of Simchat Torah, the 50th Anniversary of the Yom Kippur War, merely bolstered dispassionate hard-liners in the Knesset and drew forth those advocating a Dresden Solution. The outcome this week, in which a ceasefire went into effect yesterday with the release of three hostages, merely reminds all and sundry that 7/10 was anything but a peaceful exercise in coexistence.

And for months, the issue of the hostages appeared to wane if not disappear altogether, as the Pro-War mobs screaming “genocide” were fed a constant stream of Hamas propaganda, designed to outrage and subvert democracy. Embedding rocket-firing militia inside hospitals, schools and suburbs meant that any counter-strike by Israel was immediately labeled a ‘war-crime’.

You could almost believe the calls to ‘eliminate the Zionist state’, and find virtue in ‘From the River to the Sea”, but strip away these tired slogans, the empty political rhetoric, and all one is left with is the insanity of Jihad, (a Jihadicide as some might call it), in which the only solution being offered up is a clerical Arab dictatorship supported by Iran, this reworking of the old testament versus a vaguely secular democratic state of Israel.

Images of three women surrounded by Jihadists, brought home the manner in which the hostages came to be held by Hamas in tunnels beneath Gaza during 15 months of devastating conflict. They included the joint British national Emily Damari, released and reunited with their mothers in the first act of a ceasefire deal aimed at ending the conflict.

As masked Hamas militia wearing Islamic head-bands surrounded the women, it became clear the news images were no longer of a devastated populace, but rather of a stream of well-fed Jihadists emerging from underground tunnels.

Damari, 28, Romi Gonen, 24 and Doron Steinbrecher, 31, were handed over to the International Committee for the Red Cross in Gaza on Sunday afternoon, ending a protracted ordeal that began with their violent abduction by Hamas on 7 October 2023. We hope this ceasefire process continues.

The Gazan militias should take full responsibility for the mess and cleanup.

Update: Another four women have been released. This time Hamas handed out ‘certificates of completion’, in a bizarre press conference.

READ: Peace requires honest brokerage’ in Gaza – Nelson Mandela Foundation

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